I tried these brain-monitoring headphones that claim to improve concentration

One afternoon, I was using the device for a little over an hour when I heard a voice in my earpiece say, “You deserve a brain break.” Alcaide says the device can detect when your concentration starts to wane, and the feature is meant to help people avoid burnout. “We can tell you when you need a break when we start to detect your brain is tired,” he says. I didn’t feel tired, but I went ahead and took the 10-minute break the app suggested.

The other day, I racked up 200 points in a day and won a trophy that said “you’re on fire.” Similar to Fitbit badges, which are designed to reward your physical activity, Alcaide says the idea is to nudge people toward good habits.

It gave me a little extra motivation in the same way that hitting 10,000 steps a day on my Fitbit felt like a accomplishment. I can’t say I’ve changed my work habits significantly as a result of using the device, but I’m trying to be more mindful of how I multitask. Perhaps over a longer period of time, I’ll be able to glean more nuanced information about my focus habits.

All this information It’s interesting, but I wonder how accurate it is. Like most tech companies, Neurable doesn’t share details about how its algorithm works. I reached out to W. Hong Yeo, a biomedical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology who develops wearable brainwave-reading devices, to get an outside perspective on whether EEG is really sensitive enough to tell when I’m focused and when I’m not.

“It’s doable as long as you can measure the EEG signal consistently and robustly,” he told me. Yeo’s current work involves trying to measure cognitive decline in older adults using EEG.

The challenge in developing a wearable BCI compared to an invasive BCI is that the signal quality is lower because the electrodes have to record through the skin and skull. And whenever there is any movement, “you don’t have good contact with the skin, so your EEG signal might not be recorded,” Yeo says.

Because Neurable doesn’t make any health claims, the company’s headset doesn’t have to be rigorously tested as a medical device. Unlike disease detection, which requires more electrodes placed in specific locations on the scalp, focal spot measurements are more subjective because there’s no gold standard, Yeo said. The company has ambitions to use its headset as a medical device to monitor brain health and diagnose neurological conditions, but for now, the company is starting with consumer applications.

However, brainwave data is highly personal, and devices like Neurable raise questions about how user data is stored and protected. Molnar explains that the headset converts raw EEG data into focused information, anonymizes that data, deletes the raw data on the device, and sends it to the app. That focused data is encrypted, uploaded to Neurable’s cloud, and stored in a database. The user’s personal information, such as their name, email address, and password, is encrypted and stored in a separate database.